Legal Latins: Creating Webs and Practices of Immigration Status among Latin American Migrants in London

Abstract

Despite an increasingly globalised world, the effects of ever more restrictive barriers to people's movement result in people developing complex and innovative ways to enter and settle in countries beyond their own. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative research with Latin Americans in London from a range of nationalities and socio-economic backgrounds, this paper examines how migrants across the spectrum of immigration statuses have responded to these restrictions with a particular focus on negotiating irregularity. Through analysing how migrants develop a range of entry, regularisation as well as spatial, economic and social invisibility practices as they arrive and settle, the paper challenges a binary hierarchy of immigration status and subsequent well-being. Instead, it argues that conceptualising these as the creation of webs encapsulates the complexity and dynamism of migrant irregularity as migrants negotiate from above and below. The paper highlights how these webs and practices emerge from below in innovative ways that entail negotiation of fluid migration regimes that structure a wider context of exclusion within which migrants can exercise agency from below.

Keywords:

• Irregularity
• Practices
• Latin Americans
• Immigration Status

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Latin American Women's Rights Service, the Trust for London and the Leverhulme Trust [grant number RF/7/2006/0080] for funding this research as well as Carila Latin America Welfare Group, Juan Camilo Cock, Brian Linneker, Carolina Velasquez and the team of community researchers. I am also grateful to Davide Pero for comments on an earlier version and to the two anonymous referees.